"Our goal would be to collect pictures and stories about the quilts and coverlets owned by members of the TSDAR."--p.3.

Here is the largest, most comprehensive history of American quilts ever published! The Quilt explores the evolution of quilting in America, showing in vivid colors and patterns how African American, Amish, Hawaiian, Hmong, and Native American quilts celebrate cultural identity, and how quilts connect us to one another through quilting bees and other community groups. Noted quilt historian Elise Schebler Roberts also goes beyond the historical nature of quilts to cover current efforts at quilt preservation, collecting and appraising, and state documentation projects. Her book features an encyclopedia of favorite quilt styles and is gloriously illustrated with more than 200 full-color photographs of classic collectible quilts.

Masterpiece quilts and Master quilters--both are honored in The Quilters Hall of Fame. The book profiles more than forty of the quilting world's most influential people--from early twentieth-century quilt designer Ruby McKim to quilt curator Jonathan Holstein to contemporary art quilter Nancy Crow. Lavishly illustrated with one hundred glorious color photographs of their quilts, plus historical photographs, ads, and pattern booklets, The Quilters Hall of Fame is essential for every quilter's bookshelf.

Roots of a Region reveals the importance of folk traditions in shaping and expressing the American South. This overview covers the entire region and all forms of ex-pression-oral, musical, customary, and material. The author establishes how folklore pervades and reflects the region\'s economics, history (espe-cially the Civil War), race rela-tions, religion, and politics. He follows with a catalog of those folk-cultural traits-from food and crafts to music and story-that are distinctly southern. The book then explores the Native American and Old World sources of southern folk culture. Two case studies serve as examples to stu-dents and as evidence of the author\'s larger points. The first traces the origins and develop-ment of an artifact type, the clay jug; the second examines a place, Georgia, and the relationship of its folklore to the region as a whole. The author concludes by looking to the future of folklife in a region that has lost much of its agrarian base as it modernizes, a future dependent on recent immigration and appreciation of older southern traditions by a largely urban audience. Supporting these explorations are 115 illustrations-sixteen in color-and an extensive bibliography of books on southern folk culture. John A. Burrison is Regents Professor of English and director of the folklore curriculum at Georgia State University. He also serves as curator of the Goizueta Folklife Gallery at the Atlanta History Museum and of the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia at Sautee Nacoochee Center. His previous books are Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery, Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South, and Shaping Traditions: Folk Arts in a Changing South.

The Great Smoky Mountains, at the border of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, are among the highest peaks of the southern Appalachian chain. Although this area shares much with the cultural traditions of all southern Appalachia, the folklife here has been uniquely shaped by historical events, including the Cherokee Removal of the 1830s and the creation of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park a century later. This book surveying the rich folklife of this special place in the American South offers a view of the culture as it has been defined and changed by scholars, missionaries, the federal government, tourists, and people of the region themselves. Here is an overview of the history of a beautiful landscape, one that examines the character typified by its early settlers, by the displacement of the people, and by the manner in which the folklife was discovered and defined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here also is an examination of various folk traditions and a study of how they have changed and evolved.

In Clues in the Calico Barbara Brackman unveils a much-needed system for dating America's heirloom quilts. She tells how, by collecting and observing quilts and finally analyzing her computer file on close to 900 date-inscribed specimens, she arrived at the system. And through this telling she also imparts a colorful, stunningly illustrated history of quiltmaking along with a good bit of entertaining social history and the newest findings in textile research.

Quilts bear witness to the American experience. With a history that spans the early republic to the present day, this form of textile art can illuminate many areas of American life, such as immigration and settlement, the development of our nation’s textile industry, and the growth of mass media and marketing. In short, each quilt tells a story that is integral to America’s history. Comfort and Glory introduces an outstanding collection of American quilts and quilt history documentation, the Winedale Quilt Collection at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. This volume showcases 115 quilts—nearly one-quarter of the Winedale Collection—through stunning color photographs (including details) and essays about each quilt’s history and construction. The selections span more than two hundred years of American quiltmaking and represent a broad range of traditional styles and functions. Utility quilts, some worn or faded, join show quilts, needlework masterpieces, and “best” quilts saved for special occasions. Texas quilts, including those made in or brought to Texas during the nineteenth century, constitute a significant number of the selections. Color photographs of related documents and material culture objects from the Briscoe Center’s collections—quilting templates, a painted bride’s box, sheet music, a homespun dress, a brass sewing bird, and political ephemera, among them—enrich the stories of many of the quilts.

This volume supplements the acclaimed three volume set published in 1986 and consists of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1984 and 1988. There are more than 6,000 descriptive entries in a wide range of categories: anthropology and folklore, art and architecture, history, literature, music, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, science and technology, and sociology.

Collections of textiles—historic costume, quilts, needlework samplers, and the like—have benefited greatly from the digital turn in museum and archival work. Both institutional online repositories and collections-based social media sites have fostered unprecedented access to textile collections that have traditionally been marginalized in museums. How can curators, interpreters, and collections managers make best use of these new opportunities? To answer this question, the author worked with sites including the Great Lakes Quilt Center at the Michigan State University Museum, the Design Center at Philadelphia University, the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the WGBH Boston Media Library and Archives, as well as user-curated social sites online such as Tumblr and Polyvore, to create four compelling case studies on the preservation, access, curation, and interpretation of textile objects. The book explores: The nature of digital material culture. The role of audience participation versus curatorial authority online. Audience-friendly collections metadata and tagging. Visual, rather than text-based, searching and cataloging. The legality of ownership and access of museum collections online. Gender equity in museums and archives. This book is essential reading for anyone who cares for, collects, exhibits, or interprets historic costume or textile collections, but its broad implications for the future of museum work make it relevant for anyone with an interest in museum work online. And because the focus of this volume is theory and praxis, rather than specific technologies that are likely to become obsolete, it will be staple on your bookshelf for years to come.